The first installment of War, created by ncomment, appeared online this past April. It imagined the social bookmarking site Digg as a city, one built on participatory democracy. But as power users gain more power within the city of Digg, unrest sparks among its citizenry, and some of the users discuss reforms. But before they can effect any changes, they are invaded by aliens from rival social network reddit.

The second installment just went up, and envisions the city of Digg under reddit occupation, as well as giving us a peek at the neighboring nations of Mixx and Twitter. A number of other websites are namechecked as well, and if you pay attention, you might notice a familiar logo:

Chances are, we'll have to wait a few months for the exciting conclusion of War. Will the Diggers reclaim their territory? Will the reddit forces convince the occupied diggers to give up memespeak? And what do TechCrunch bars actually taste like?

War, Part 1, Part 2 [via reddit]

According to a statement about the research from Indiana University:

When information is freely shared, good ideas can stunt innovation by distracting others from pursuing even better ideas, according to Indiana University cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone . . .

This study used a virtual environment in which study participants worked in specifically designed groups to solve a problem . . . In the "fully connected" group, everyone's work was completely accessible to everyone else — much like a tight-knit family or small town. In the "locally connected" group, participants primarily were aware of what their neighbors, or the people on either side, were doing. In the "small world" group, participants also were primarily aware of what their neighbors were doing, but they also had a few distant connections that let them send or retrieve good ideas from outside of their neighborhood.

Goldstone found that the fully connected groups performed the best when solving simple problems. Small world groups, however, performed better on more difficult problems. For these problems, the truism "The more information, the better" is not valid.

"The small world network preserves diversity," Goldstone said. "One clique could be coming up with one answer, another clique could be coming up with another. As a result, the group as a whole is searching the problem space more effectively. For hard problems, connecting people by small world networks offers a good compromise between having members explore a variety of innovations, while still quickly disseminating promising innovations throughout the group.